Microsoft is quietly developing a software rasterizer that allows x86 processors to render DirectX 10 graphics—and some early performance tests might surprise you. According to an article on MSDN, the Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP) will ship as part of Windows 7, and a beta version is already available in the November 2008 DirectX development toolkit.

WARP will come in handy in a number of cases, Microsoft writes, like when a user's graphics card is broken or the graphics driver malfunctions. The company is also targeting casual gamers who want prettier graphics than what their GPU (or integrated graphics hardware) might be able to deliver